The
British Library (BL) is the
national library of the United Kingdom
. It is located in London
and is one
of the world's largest research libraries, holding over
150 million items in all known languages and formats; books, journals, newspapers, magazines,
sound and music recordings, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and much
more. Its book collection is second only to the
American Library of
Congress
. The Library's collections include around 25
million books, along with substantial additional collection of
manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300
BC.
As a
legal deposit library, the BL receives
copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and the Republic of
Ireland
, including all foreign books distributed in the
UK. It also purchases many items which are only published
outside Britain and Ireland. The British Library adds some three
million items every year.
The Library is a
non-departmental public body
sponsored by the
Department for Culture,
Media and Sport.
Historical background
The British Library was created in 1973 by the
British Library
Act 1972.
Prior to this, the national library was part
of the British
Museum
, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new
library, alongside various smaller organisations which were folded
in (such as the British National Bibliography). In 1983, the Library
absorbed the National Sound Archive
. The core of the Library's historical
collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from
the eighteenth century, known as the 'foundation collections'.
These include the books and manuscripts of
Sir Robert Cotton,
Sir Hans Sloane,
Robert Harley
and
King George III.
For many
years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around
central London, in places such as
Bloomsbury
(within the British Museum), Chancery Lane
, and Holborn
, with an
interlibrary lending centre at Boston Spa
, Wetherby
in West Yorkshire
(situated on Thorp Arch Trading Estate
) and the newspaper library at Colindale
, north-west London. However, since 1997
the main collection has been housed in a single new building on
Euston
Road
next to St. Pancras railway station
. However, post-1800 newspapers are still
held at Colindale, and the Document Supply Centre is still in
Yorkshire.
The Library also has a book storage depot in
Woolwich
, south-east London. The new library was
designed specially for the purpose by the architect
Colin St. John Wilson.
Facing Euston Road is a large piazza that includes pieces of public art, such as large sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based on
William Blake's study of Isaac Newton) and Antony Gormley. It is the largest
public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.
In the middle of the building is a four-storey glass tower
containing the
King's Library, with
65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and
maps collected by
King
George III between 1763 and 1820.
Since 2000 the Chief Executive of the British Library has been
Lynne Brindley.
Legal deposit
Interior of the British Library, with
the smoked glass wall of the King's Library in the
background.
An
Act of Parliament in 1911
established the principle of the legal
deposit, ensuring that the British Library, along with five
other libraries in Great
Britain
and Ireland
, is entitled to receive a free copy of every item
published in the United Kingdom. The other five
libraries are: the Bodleian Library
at Oxford
; the
University
Library
at Cambridge
; the Trinity College Library
at Dublin
; and the
National Libraries of Scotland
and Wales
. The British Library is the only one that
must automatically receive a copy of every item published in the
UK; the others are entitled to these items, but must specifically
request them from the publisher after learning that they have been
or are about to be published, a task done centrally by the
Agency for the Legal
Deposit Libraries.
Further,
under the terms of Irish copyright law (most recently the Copyright and Related
Rights Act 2000), the British Library is entitled to
automatically receive a free copy of every book published in the
Republic of
Ireland, alongside the National
Library of Ireland
, the Trinity College Library at Dublin, the library
of the University
of Limerick
, the library of Dublin City University
and the libraries of the four constituent
universities of the National University of
Ireland. The Bodleian Library, Cambridge University
Library, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales are also
entitled to copies of material published in Ireland, but again must
formally make requests.
In 2003
the Ipswich
MP Chris Mole introduced
a Private Member's Bill, which
eventually passed, becoming the Legal Deposit Libraries Act
2003. This Act extends United Kingdom legal deposit
requirements to electronic documents, such as
CD-ROMs and selected
websites. The BL explains its policies on legal
deposit
here.
Using the Library's Reading Rooms
The Library is in theory open to everyone who has a genuine need to
use its collections. Anyone with a permanent address who wishes to
carry out research can apply for a
Reader Pass; they are required to provide proof
of signature and address for security purposes.Historically, only
those wishing to use specialised material unavailable in other
public or academic libraries would be given a Reader Pass.
Recently, the Library has been criticised for admitting numbers of
undergraduate students (who have
access to their own university libraries) to the reading rooms. The
Library replied that they have always admitted undergraduates as
long as they have a legitimate personal, work-related or academic
research purpose.
Catalogue entries can be found on the British Library Integrated
Catalogue, which is based on Aleph (a commercial
Integrated Library
System). Western Manuscripts are indexed and described on
MOLCAT and the
Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.
The Library's website also
offers other specialised catalogues and research services.
According to the website, more than half a million people use the
Library's reading rooms every year. The large reading rooms offer
hundreds of seats which are often filled with researchers,
especially during the Easter and Summer holidays.
Material available online
The British Library makes almost none of its collections available
online and free to the public. Its
Online Gallery gives
access to 30,000 images from various medieval books, together with
a handful of exhibition-style items in a proprietary format, such
as the
Lindisfarne Gospels. This
includes the facility to "turn the virtual pages" of a few
documents, such as
Leonardo da
Vinci's notebooks.
The British Library's commercial
secure electronic delivery
service was started in 2003 at a cost of £6 million. This
offers more than 100 million items (including 280,000 journal
titles, 50 million patents, 5 million reports, 476,000 U.S.
dissertations and 433,000 conference proceedings) for researchers
and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable
outside the Library due to
copyright
restrictions. In line with a government directive that the British
Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is
charged to the user. However, this service is no longer profitable
and has led to a series of restructures to try to prevent further
losses.
When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement
with
Microsoft to digitise a number of
books from the British Library for its
Live Search Books project. This material
was only available to readers in the USA, and closed in May
2008.
Exhibitions
A number of books are on display to the general public in the
Sir John Ritblat Gallery which is open seven days a
week at no charge. Some of the items there include
Beowulf, a
Gutenberg Bible,
Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales,
Thomas Malory's
Le Morte Darthur (
King Arthur)
Captain
Cook's journal,
Jane Austen's
History of England,
Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre,
Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures Under
Ground,
Rudyard Kipling's
Just So Stories,
Charles Dickens's
Nicholas Nickleby,
Virginia Woolf's
Mrs Dalloway and a room devoted solely to
the
Magna Carta.
Business & IP Centre
In May 2005, the British Library received a grant of £1 million
from the
London Development
Agency to change two of its reading rooms into the Business
& IP Centre. The Centre was opened in March 2006. It holds
arguably the most comprehensive collection of business and
intellectual property (IP) in the
United Kingdom and is the official library of the
UK Intellectual Property
Office.
The Business & IP Centre is separated into two distinct
areas:
Business information
The collection is divided up into four main information areas:
market research; company
information; trade directories; and
journals. It is available for free in hard copy and
online via approximately 30 subscription databases. You must have a
reader pass to access the collection and the databases.
Patent and intellectual property information
There are over 50 million
patent
specifications from 40 countries in a collection dating back to
1855. The collection also includes official gazettes on patents,
trade marks and
Registered Design; law reports and other
material on
litigation; and information
on
copyright. This is available in hard
copy and via online databases. A reader's pass is required to
access the collection and database.
Staff are trained to guide
small and medium enterprises
(SME) and
entrepreneurs to use the
full range of resources. The Business & IP Centre also offers
additional services including:
- The provision of a networking area for SMEs to meet and network
with other SMEs, find out about the Library's full range of
services and get inspiration from success stories about products
and services conceived by other centre users.
- Workshops and clinics run by the British Library and its
business partners on subjects including: using intellectual
property resources to check if ideas are novel, how to protect your
ideas & designs, capitalising on market research resources,
financing, marketing and selling skills, and pinpointing customers.
Some of these workshops have a specific focus on supporting the
needs of women, black and Asian minority ethnic groups, and
entrepreneurs with disabilities. These are free or charged at a
subsidised rate.
- 'Ask an expert' sessions. These are one-to-one advice sessions
with notable business figures. Previous experts have been the late
Anita Roddick and Tim Campbell.
- Events featuring successful entrepreneurs. Previous events have
included ‘Winners – The Rise and Rise of Black British
Entrepreneurs’, ‘The Asian Advantage’, and ‘Mothers of Invention’.
These are available as webcasts.
Sound archive
The
British
Library Sound Archive
holds more than a million discs and 200,000
tapes. The collections come from all over the world and
cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and
literature to oral history and wildlife sounds, stretching back
over more than 100 years.
The Sound Archive's online catalogue is updated
daily.
It is also possible to listen to recordings from the collection in
selected Reading Rooms in the Library through their
SoundServer and
Listening and Viewing
Service, which is based in the Rare Books & Music
Reading Room.
In 2006 the Library launched a new online resource
Archival Sound Recordings which
makes over 4,200 hours of the Sound Archive's recordings available
online for UK higher and further education.
Newspapers
British Library Newspapers,
Colindale
The
British Library Newspapers section is based in Colindale in North London. The Library has an almost
complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840.
This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869,
which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a
newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and
Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total the
collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of
microfilm containing tens of millions of
newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km of shelves.
Among the collections are the
Thomason
Tracts, containing 7,200
seventeenth century newspapers, and the
Burney Collection, featuring
newspapers from the late
eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. The Thomason Tracts
and Burney collections are held at St Pancras, and are available in
facsimile.
The section also has extensive records of non-British newspapers in
languages that use the
Latin and
Cyrillic alphabets. The collection
is less substantial for languages of the
Middle East and the rest of Asia, though some
holdings of these are held at the main library in St.
Pancras.
Philatelic collections
The National Philatelic Collections are held at the BL. The
Collections were established in 1891 with the donation of the
Tapling collection, they steadily developed and now comprise over
25 major collections and a number of smaller ones, encompassing a
wide-range of disciplines. The collections include
postage and
revenue
stamps,
postal stationery,
essays,
proofs,
covers
and entries, "
cinderella stamp"
material, specimen issues,
airmails, some
postal history materials, official
and private
posts, etc., for almost
all countries and periods.
An extensive display of material from the collections is on
exhibit, which may be the best permanent display of diverse classic
stamps and philatelic material in the world. Approximately 80,000
items on 6,000 sheets may be viewed in 1,000 display frames; 2,400
sheets are from the Tapling Collection. All other material, which
covers the whole world, is available to students and researchers by
appointment.
As well as these collections, the library actively acquires
literature on the subject. This makes the British Library one of
the world's prime philatelic research centres. The Curator of the
philatelic collection is
David
Beech.
Threatened cutbacks to services
In February 2007 it was announced that threatened Treasury cuts to
the British Library budget might necessitate cutbacks in services
and facilities.
The library responded by threatening to
charge scholars and researchers for admission, reduce the reading
room opening hours, and close the public exhibitions, schools
learning programmes and the national newspaper archive in Colindale.
Miscellaneous information
The
Library also holds the Asia,
Pacific and Africa Collections
(APAC) which include the India Office
Records
and materials in the languages of Asia and of north
and north-east Africa.
The British Library does not specifically serve the legislature.
Parliament
has its own libraries, the House of
Commons Library
and the House of Lords Library
.
The Guinness Book of World
Records currently lists the American Library of
Congress as the "World's Largest Library". However,
this is based on the shelf space the collection occupies; the
Library of Congress states that its collection fills about 530
miles (850 km), while the British Library reports about 388
miles (625 km) of shelves. On the other hand, the Library of
Congress holds about 130 million items with 29 million books, as
against approximately 150 million items with 25 million books for
the British Library.
Paradoxymoron, a
trompe
l'oeil painting by
Patrick Hughes, is on show on the
lower ground floor.
The Library has an associated
Friends charity called the
Friends of the British
Library. The charity is located on site at the main library
facility in St. Pancras, but is a separate entity from the library
itself.
Highlights of the collections
See also
References
- Encyclopædia Britannica Article: British Library
- A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard; Tristram Hunt,
Guardian.
- Onlin Gallery
- Socialist Worker article
-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/nov/04/microsoft.books
- British Library: The Tapling Collection
- Guiness World Records: Amazing Feats: Big Stuff:
Library: Largest library
- Welcome
Message from the Librarian of Congress
- The British Library: About us: Did you know?
- BL, Facts & figures
- http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9707/tyndale.html
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